Glauber Costa

Glauber Costa
Born
Glauber de Oliveira Costa

1982 (age 43–44)
OccupationsCo-founder, CEO, software engineer
EmployerTurso
Known forKernel-based Virtual Machine, ScyllaDB

Glauber Costa is a Canadian software engineer recognized for his contributions to high-performance systems software, including Linux kernel, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the OSv unikernel, ScyllaDB, and Rust open source projects. Linus Torvalds recognized him as one of the top contributors to the Linux x86 subsystem.[1] Costa is currently the CEO and co-founder of Turso, reimplementation of the SQLite database in Rust.[2][3][4]

Career

Linux kernel and virtualization

Costa began his career working on the Linux kernel, with a focus on virtualization and resource isolation. In 2008 he was recognized in the Linux Foundation report "Who Writes Linux" as one of the most active contributors to the Linux Kernel.[5] In that same year, Linus Torvalds listed him among the top five committers to the x86 subsystem, alongside Ingo Molnár and Thomas Gleixner.[1] He was also recognized as the third most active 2.6.26 developers (by changeset).[6]

Costa has done significant work in the development of timekeeping primitives for the KVM hypervisor and developed parts of the memory cgroups subsystem, including early kernel memory accounting features.[7][8]

In 2011, he implemented the first per-cgroup TCP buffer limits, extending the kernel's memory controller to account for kernel memory such as TCP socket buffers.[9] He later designed mechanisms to extend memory control groups to additional parts of kernel memory, work that underpinned container isolation in Linux.[10] Costa also proposed and prototyped cgroup-aware out-of-memory (OOM) handling, allowing policies such as killing all tasks within a memory-constrained cgroup rather than individual processes.[11]

Costa was a core contributor to Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and helped merge the KVM codebase into the upstream QEMU emulator.[12]

OSv

In 2013, Costa joined Cloudius Systems, where he co-developed OSv, an open source unikernel targeting cloud workloads.[13] The OSv design is described in the USENIX ATC 2014 paper "OSv: Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines", a paper that Costa co-authored.[14]

ScyllaDB

Costa was part of the team that created ScyllaDB in 2014. He joined as a founding engineer and later advanced to VP of Field Engineering.[15] He contributed to the engine's open source Seastar framework, shard-per-core architecture, memory and I/O optimizations.[16]

Glommio

In 2020, while working at Datadog, Costa developed the Glommio open-source asynchronous Rust programming library. It uses a thread-per-core model and Linux's io_uring to support building highly parallel, low-latency applications on Linux.[17][18] The project was released publicly by Datadog.[19]

Turso

In 2021, Costa co-founded Turso (initially ChiselStrike) along with Pekka Enberg.[2][3] The company builds a distributed database that is a reimplementation of SQLite in Rust. Costa serves as the company's CEO.[4]

Publications

Costa has authored technical publications and open-source contributions throughout his career. Notably, he co-authored the research paper "OSv – Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines" presented at USENIX ATC 2014, which detailed the unikernel approach taken by OSv.[14] Costa has also written technical articles on systems programming (for instance, on how io_uring and eBPF can revolutionize Linux programming).[20] Additionally, he has spoken at conferences such as USENIX, LinuxCon, KVM Forum, Xen Project Summit, and P99 CONF.[21][22][23][24]

Patents

Costa has been granted patents for systems software and virtualization technologies:[25]

  • Guaranteeing deterministic bounded tunable downtime for live migration of virtual machines over reliable channels (US 8880773 B2)
  • Comparing source code using code statement structures (US 8533668 B2)
  • Keeping time in multi-processor virtualization environments (US 8359488 B2)
  • Building packages of functionally different programs from source code of a single program (US 9081646 B2)
  • Method and system for concise expression of optional code snippets in interpreted languages US 8549485 B2

References

  1. ^ a b "git rebase". yarchive.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  2. ^ a b "Turso Offers Web Developers Simpler, Faster Database". The New Stack. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  3. ^ a b "Backend development platform startup ChiselStrike raises $7M". SiliconANGLE. 27 July 2022. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  4. ^ a b "tursodatabase/turso". GitHub. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  5. ^ Greg Kroah-Hartman; Jonathan Corbet; Amanda McPherson. "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It Is Going, Who Is Doing It, What They Are Doing, and Who Is Sponsoring It: An August 2009 Update" (PDF). The Linux Foundation. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  6. ^ Jonathan Corbet (2 July 2008). "Some development statistics for 2.6.26 – and beyond". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  7. ^ Glauber de Oliveira Costa (6 November 2007). "kvmclock implementation, the guest part". LKML. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  8. ^ "memcontrol.c". Linux Kernel Git (glommer/memcg). Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  9. ^ Jonathan Corbet (6 December 2011). "Per-cgroup TCP buffer limits". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  10. ^ Jonathan Corbet (14 May 2013). "Smarter shrinkers". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  11. ^ Jonathan Corbet (23 April 2013). "LSFMM: Improving the out-of-memory killer". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  12. ^ "Features/KVM and QEMU merge". Fedora Project Wiki. 26 March 2009. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  13. ^ "OSv: The Open Source Cloud Operating System That Is Not Linux". Linux Foundation. 14 November 2013. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  14. ^ a b Avi Kivity; Dor Laor; Glauber Costa; Pekka Enberg; Nadav Har'El; Don Marti; Vlad Zolotarov (June 2014). OSv — Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines (PDF). Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  15. ^ "Hybrid cloud rises as an avenue for data security and business continuity". ZDNet. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  16. ^ Edwards, John (7 May 2020). "Storage and database innovation evolve in tandem". SearchStorage. TechTarget. Archived from the original on 10 August 2025. Retrieved 1 October 2025.
  17. ^ "docs.rs – Rust crate documentation". docs.rs. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  18. ^ "Announcing tokio-uring: io-uring support for Tokio". Tokio. 2021. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  19. ^ "DataDog/glommio". GitHub. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  20. ^ "How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux". The New Stack. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  21. ^ "Resource Isolation: The Failure of Operating Systems & How We Can Fix It". LinuxCon Europe 2012 Schedule. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  22. ^ "LinuxCon/CloudOpen North America 2016 Schedule". Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  23. ^ "USENIX ATC '14 – Speakers & Organizers". Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  24. ^ "OPW: The Xen Project Developer Summit". Xen Project. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  25. ^ "Glauber Costa – Patents". Google Patents. Retrieved 29 September 2025.

See also

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